The New BrianSiguenza.com

Had there not been a pandemic, I would be in Pittsburgh right now to catch a flight to JFK in New York early tomorrow morning and then on to Tokyo for the Summer Olympics. Alas, there will be no overnight turnarounds, flight connections, and airport customs to go through, but this will still turn out to be a pretty busy week, starting tonight with a review of the e-mail addresses rejected by the software that I am using. The report indicated that some were incorrect, others it did not know. I am concerning myself mostly with the addresses that are for sure invalid. My goal is to continue until there are no more known bad accounts. If I get too involved with the ones that are unsure, this project is going to take much longer than it already has, so I will leave those alone and hope for the best.

I was also able to get in an interview this evening with Nathan McCarter, who has done work for Bleacher Report and is now with One FC Championship, an ultimate fighting league in Southeast Asia. This is a chance to share a little about how I go about reporting. I have an iPhone which includes the Voice Memos function, so I record my conversations with interviewees, always making sure they are okay with my recording them. I ask the questions, they respond, then later I go back and transcribe our conversation, taking the quotes I think will be the most appropriate for the story. That is how I have been doing it for almost two decades now and it has worked for me. Any of you aspiring journalists out there would do well to use the Voice Memo function on your cell phone if you have that capability.

The weekend is just about over, and my review of all the major league e-mails that I have are coming close to an end as well. To check the validity of the addresses, I have invested a very small sum–$2.95, just a little more than a large Starbucks–in software that allows me to take my Excel spreadsheet and place it in their server for inspection. Sure enough, several of the addresses came back as being bad, but it is better to find that out now rather than after trying to send the contacts an e-mail. That would be very embarrassing albeit unavoidable given that many of the addresses have not been made publicly available, leading to an educated guess based on the research performed. The e-mail addresses identified as invalid I will need to go back and try to find a different one and keep going until all viable options have been exhausted.

Looking ahead to the week, I am in the process of scheduling interviews for former student profiles, so those will be coming up. Always nice to get back to my journalistic roots once in a while by asking a few questions, really more of a conversation about people and their lives. I think I have always been more drawn to those types of stories than the ones about fires and fraud. Anyway, I will be sure to share some of those conversations with you once I have had the chance to have them and review what was discussed. I’ll also take you through my tried-and-true reporting method.

Not really a whole lot to update you on this Saturday evening, other than that I continue to search and update to the best of my ability the information on the e-mail lists from the Communication and Fundraising in Sport course. I hesitate to liken the process to finding a needle in a haystack but some of these people are pretty hard to find. There are only so many ways I can describe sitting at a laptop and looking up information. I find it pretty fascinating myself and could do it all day long but I also see where others would be completely bored by it. To each their own, I say.

In fact, as I am sure many people are finding out during this pandemic, finding real experiences is a challenge working virtually. Yes, I have my weekly meetings with the group via Zoom but that also involves sitting in front of a laptop and discussing what needs to be done. The most interesting aspect of those is Dr. Tiell getting in a round of golf and Liston preparing for a campaign event as he runs for City Council of Fort Myers, Fla. Regardless of the circumstances, we still manage to be productive in our hour or so together. Beyond that, however, there is not a whole lot more I can say about those meetings. My work is also largely independent, there is nobody to coach or manage. Just me, my trusty laptop, and sometimes the gang on Zoom. It is a challenge, but I do enjoy it.

I have reached out to each person on the list of subjects provided to me for a promotional interview. There are four altogether, so it was a quick e-mail to see what availability they had in the next week for a phone conversation about their experience in the Tiffin Sport Management program. With that step out of the way, I could focus on going through e-mail contacts in the five North American major leagues. There are at least thirty teams in each of the so-called “Big Four”–MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL–so that’s 120 contacts right there, then Major League Soccer has twenty-six franchises, with more on the way (Groel, 2019). Now we’re pushing 150 names and that isn’t counting minor leagues or the WNBA or National Women’s Soccer League.

Bottom line is that there are a lot of e-mails I have to review, which means the process is going to take a bit of time. It will also take some investigative work to find a proper e-mail. Some of the team websites have that information readily available, while others presumably do not want some random fan to write them nasty messages about the team’s in-game performance. In those instances, e-mail search services come in quite handy. Now I would be kidding myself if I thought we would be able to have every e-mail address correct using this method, but it is a good starting point for what we want to do. With that, I will be spending time this weekend trying to find elusive sports executive contact information.

Reference

Groel, C. (2019, July 20). Do major North American sports leagues have too many teams? Retrieved from https://medium.com/top-level-sports/do-major-north-american-sports-leagues-have-too-many-teams-3af35ffa11d0

This has certainly been a busy Thursday. It began with my hour-long conference call to discuss the main project. This includes the video promo I did plus a brochure, which I sent over to the group afterward. I also got an e-mail with a list of to-dos which should keep me quite busy for some time. One item involves reaching out to former students in the Tiffin University Sports Management program who are now out working in the field. They are all with some pretty high-profile organizations and I can tell you a little more about them once I have contacted them and completed interviews for a promotional tool.

The other side project is an extension of an assignment from the most recent course I had, Communication and Fundraising in Sport. The class was broken out into groups to present a marketing plan for the TU Sport Management program. The plan was to target a specific audience. My group was assigned to those working in baseball and we had to create a list of e-mails for contacts at each team. Ironically, one of the collaborators in that effort is with the Cincinnati Reds and on my list of people to contact for promotional interviews. Anyway, I have now been tasked with going back through the lists submitted by all the groups–not just baseball, but hockey, basketball, football, and soccer–and filling in missing content. Data compilation and verification can be rather fun and I am looking forward to seeing who the key staff is at sports organizations across the country. Much more on that later.

After sharing the document on how to access the website, I got some feedback on what is there. As expected, there were recommendations to amend some of the content and add another page. Nothing all that terrible, which I am pleased with. This has been a rather short week for me due to people being unavailable. The website has been my primary project over the past week. A lot of good information about the ICC is already there and with the necessary changes it will be even better.

Realizing that I do not know everything there is to know, I am a big believer in collaborating on my work and sharing it with others for their input because what often happens is that they come up with ideas that I never even thought of. Sometimes, I will consider things that no one else has. Between me and the people I am working with, we have a synergy of ideas that makes our concept just that much better. I am still doing the design and layout on the website, for example, but through reaching out to the ICC and hearing what preferences they have for the look and feel of their website, they play a role in the process, which is honestly how it should be. We do not have everything that should be on the website yet, but that will come as we move forward. I feel that my work has an impact on the ICC and so it bears repeating: this is such a fun experience to be part of.

A thought that is undoubtedly going through the minds of many managers right now is what would happen if somebody on their staff caught the coronavirus and became unable to perform his or her job. It is problematic in particular when the person possesses some sort of knowledge that is critical to the operations of the business. Crosstraining and succession planning exist to minimize any potential disruption to core functions. Certainly, no one plans to go out and get sick so the scenario described above is a worst-case, but businesses have to prepare themselves for such drastic instances. While my term with the ICC is meant to be temporary, the organization will carry on with its mission long after I am gone.

For that reason, I have put together a quick reference tutorial for accessing the ICC website. It is a basic step-by-step guide that shows how to log into the site and view certain sections. I can show you what the screen looks like but obviously, I cannot give you information that would compromise the ICC in any way. Because it is in WordPress, the setup is the exact same as the personal site I am using. The document I created is very high-level and deals mostly with getting into the site, though I do summarize briefly how to add pages and edit content. At some point, we will probably need a more comprehensive review on making changes but for right now, this is good information without unnecessarily wading too much into the weeds.

The long weekend is coming to a close and so has my project of creating a website from scratch. The first wave of it, anyway. I have no doubt that modifications will need to be made once the team has had a chance to review it. I almost never get it right on the first try, and I don’t mean that as a knock on my abilities. The reality is that duties of a high-level nature like that are never perfect right out of the gate. It takes a great deal of fine-tuning to craft it into something that is great. We are fortunate to have the benefit of time, which is not always the case. I, personally, am fortunate to have a group over at the ICC that is not afraid to give an honest assessment of work being done on their behalf.

I feel that I sound like a broken record on a lot of these posts, but I have to blog each day about what I do and I tend to work on projects over the course of several days. Again, we have the benefit of time on some of these matters, while there is a sense of urgency on others. It really is exciting to be in the mix on all of it and most importantly, I gain more insight into the operations of a sporting organization and you just cannot beat possessing that kind of knowledge. Which means I will have a lot more to share in the weeks ahead.

Let me just start by wishing those in the United States a happy July Fourth. Canada, I’m sorry that I missed you a few days before but hopefully, you were able to celebrate your nation’s independence safely just as I hope the same for my fellow Americans today. I am working on this holiday so to speak, continuing with the creation of the ICC website. I am using WordPress to build the pages, theoretically, it is easier than writing code. It is still, however, a rather laborious process when you are creating four different pages. Formatting in particular can be a great challenge. What I have learned about websites over the years is that there is a process known as WYSIWIG. Pronounced “wizzy-wig,” the term is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get.

That is not always the case because when I go to position an image and text below in a chosen alignment, there is some code on the back end that prevents the desired layout from happening. If that sounds complicated, it is, and a big reason why making four pages takes such a long time. I am not complaining, though, because I need to get the hours in. We could probably throw in bells and whistles if we wanted to, but I know that as a user I get rather annoyed with features that cause the “too much energy” warning to pop up on my MacBook. So I would rather that the website be as basic as possible, still visually appealing, but not burdensome to the visitor or their computer.

With this being a long holiday weekend where I am not out partaking in other activities, it is as good a time as any to begin work on a website for the ICC. I have been given the go-ahead to purchase a domain and then create pages using WordPress, the same system I use for this site. Once you get the hang of it, WordPress is pretty simple to use. A lot simpler than trying to write code, that is for certain. At this point, my work is just setting the site up and as time goes, we will add more substantial content to the site. Considering we are offering a web-based service, it is important that we have a presence on the web for people to learn more.

Of course, that is also what I am here for–to take you through the process of building our product from the ground up and eventually show our intended audience the benefits of using it. Each day I am learning that much more about what this is going to look like and will eventually reach the point where I can share everything I know with you, so stay here for updates. We are just getting started with our very exciting work. I have got a lot ahead of me, the ICC website first and foremost. There are other irons in the fire such as the promotional video and brochure which I have described in previous entries. With that, I shall continue on!